Randa Abdel-Fattah

speaker

3,221 appearances 41 recordings 9 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 8 Sep

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.

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Throughline · American history through song · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

I came to this old barn to talk with historian Jill Lepore.

She's written a 900-page history of the United States.

And she told us that even before the Revolution, America was already a melting pot.

18th century Atlantic seaboard culture was a crazy thing.

mix, probably about the most sort of ethnically, racially, linguistically pluralist that the country has ever been.

Philadelphia was the biggest city, very English in many ways, but also quite Dutch and a lot of Irish and very German.

And then the enslaved population was sizable, but so was the free black population, because by 1759, when Hopkinson was writing, already Quakers had condemned and denounced slavery.

So a really wonderfully vibrant culture.

Yeah, the music really starts to mingle right away.

People brought what they had when they came here.

We all carry songs with us and Africans brought their songs with them.

The seeds of traditional black spirituals like Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.

To think of the music as surviving is just an incredible testament to the vitality and insistence of the human spirit's need for beauty.

But I think there's another legacy of that era of great brutality that we also tend to forget, and that is it's not an accident that the world's first modern democracy is born in a part of the world that is one of the last places where human bondage exists.

In fact, it is the cries for freedom, the insistence that enslaved Africans make, and the insistence on sovereignty that indigenous peoples make.

And out of that emerges this discourse of rights, you know, that gets us all the way down to the Bill of Rights.

And the awareness of an inexcusability of tyranny over other people.

That's where the American idea is born in that crucible of violence.

Is this encouraging or is this... No, I really struggle with this.

It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around this moment, to think about this founding promise.

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